Tag: regional

Announcing a New Place

Thanks for visiting my blog. This is a where I write at length about the research, references and influences that inform my writing. This blog is a peek behind the curtain, but there’s a new place, a new story…

Find Your Place in a Story™

There’s a new trademark, too, giving greater emphasis to what I hope for my readers, that they will find their special place and a more meaningful life in the stories I tell.

To learn more about the purpose and heart of my writing, and my commitment to writing about the Great Plains and American West, I invite you to visit my new web site:

In my upcoming novel, the title of which I will soon announce, Magpie and ancestral voices are inseparable. Magpie is a figure of myth and a real bird, but also the nickname for one of my central characters. In the story, Margaret Rose doesn’t choose that nickname for herself, but it is apt. She’s both dark and light, smart, vivacious and a bit of a thief. Like the bird, she’s smart, sensitive, loyal and eager to make use of what others leave behind.

I harbored some reservations about including magpies in my Nebraska stories. I wondered if they truly inhabited the Republican River valley, as I couldn’t remember seeing one when I was a child. I try to mind regional details, as well as historical ones, in my writing. As if to answer my concerns, when I drove along the Republican River last year for my research trip, a magpie flew low along the roadside where I traveled, showing me his white belly and glossy blue-black plumage. It seemed more than a random wildlife sighting, perhaps even a blessing on how I’m weaving the birds, the characters and the myths of Magpie into my novels.

Magpies, mystery, meaning and myths run through my writing, alongside what history would retell and science would prove. Margaret, my novel’s Magpie, loves both stories and science, as do her friends. In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss about other folktales, rhymes and mythical threads I’m weaving into the early 1900s characters, along with scientific theories and historical events.

The epigraph I’ve chosen for the book is a verse from Psalm 78. I claim no Biblical authority with these words, nor do I announce any religious theme or agenda for my little book. Rather, the quote expresses my belief that we should hold on to all the stories we receive from ancestors, and bring them to light for generations.

I will open my mouth in a parable, things we have known from of old, things our ancestors have told us. Psalm 78

When we braid the old stories with our own, our lives become an extension of those who stood in this place before us. Even if the storytellers are not related to us by blood, their stories are one with this place, and their voices can deepen and amplify our own accounts.

No longer wandering alone in the midst of our facts, may we find ourselves illuminated by the multitude of ancestors, their presence, whimsy and wisdom. May our children and grandchildren, well-educated in science, consider also the light of history and myth.

(I’d like to give special thanks to Keith Williams, the photographer who captured this brilliant photo of Mr. Magpie, which I use as the featured image for this post. He kindly gave permission for me to use the image on the book cover of my upcoming novel…what a great guy, and an amazing photographer!)

My first childhood experience of greeting a magpie was in Estes Park, Colorado, in a parking lot. When I held a cracker or cookie or some other object overhead, a magpie would swoop down and take it. This interaction with people impressed me, as did the rushing, iridescent black feathers and sizzling white belly feathers on that swooping bird. Reading about magpies since, I find they have a reputation as highly intelligent thieves of shiny objects, especially in captivity.

Magpies are members of the corvid, or crow family, as are rooks, jays and nutcrackers. There are different magpie varieties, with the most widespread American bird being the type I met in Estes Park, the black-billed magpie, Pica hudsonia. Another variety with a yellow bill, Pica nuttalli, inhabits only woodland regions of central and southern California. The non-corvid Australian magpie, Cracticus tibicen, is a piebald bird. There’s also an entire genus of blue-green magpies in the Orient, Urocissa, and the azure-winged Cyanopica. A distant Corvidae relative, the black magpie Platysmurus leucoptyrus, is in fact a treepie and not a magpie. Take note, and thank you Wikipedia for sorting that out for us. We wouldn’t want to confuse our magpies and treepies!

I became a voracious seeker of magpie lore while researching my upcoming novel. Throughout North America, England, Germany, China, Korea and ancient Rome, the magpie appears in traditional stories and proverbs. On A Letter from the Netherlands, an expat British writer muses on how the superstition-laden magpie carries a bad reputation and is most often a bad omen in her tradition and family experience.

Reading about mythical magpies led me to reflect on the power and durability of myth, and how myths hold value for us today. In my next post, I’ll address this and greet Magpie as a mythic figure.

The Republican River, named for the Kitkehahki, or Republican band, of the Pawnee tribe, wanders south of Franklin, NE, the town where my grandparents and parents lived from the 1940s through the 1970s. Although I never heard them mention the deluge of 1935, now known as Nebraska’s Deadliest Flood, I learned of it as I researched that region for my first novel, The Darkwater Liar’s Account. I mention the river in that book, but its role is tame in Bridget’s 1960s narrative. For a video glimpse of the Republican River’s calm waters, see that novel’s book trailer.

In 1935, in the Republican River Valley of southern Nebraska, many people were barely scraping by. The national economic depression, so intense as to be capitalized to the Depression, took its toll. Jobs were scarce and drifters knocked on doors, begging. Farmers couldn’t get a break; rain fell only sporadically, drought scorched crops, grasshopper plagues devastated what did grow and dust storms carried off topsoil. Few had the means or equipment to irrigate, in Nebraska.

In the midst of the Dust Bowl, who could imagine the vast quantity of water that would soon come their way, in Nebraska’s deadliest flood? Who could anticipate the devastation such an ordinarily peaceful river, the Republican, could bring?

The Republican River near Franklin, NE, 2014

And who could warn them? Public communication was limited in little river towns in the 1930s. While radio programming was a big deal in the cities, radios and telephones were considered luxuries, even a waste of money, for many rural Nebraskans. Many country homes weren’t yet tied to electrical service and relied on generators and battery power for lights, radios and telephones, if they had them. “Waste not, want not” applied to treasured electricity, as it did to other commodities and daily goods, during the Depression. Leaving a radio on to hear breaking news would have been almost unheard-of. Trains brought in newspapers for national news, and local presses did their best to keep up with world news.

Nebraska’s small communities came together, though, in ways we’ve almost forgotten. News could travel fast over back fences and on Main Streets. Church and social gatherings pulled people together, and gossip was a means of sharing and rehashing not only scandal, but also politics, national and international news. Newspapers ruled the information domain, in the 1930s. Rural customers with telephones usually had party lines, where the customer would listen for his or her number of rings, to answer . . . or to listen in on the other customers’ calls. In emergencies, the operator could ring through to these fortunate few, and telephone switchboard operators proved themselves heroes in Nebraska, 1935, warning many of the oncoming disaster.

Yet, weather information was scarce, and forecasting still in its infancy. The Weather Bureau in the early 1930s began to replace its weather-tracking kites with airplanes, to gather weather data, particularly in tracking cold- and warm-air masses. For the average person on the Great Plains, the impending weather was rarely forecast with any real accuracy. What was known or could be guessed at from widely-spaced weather stations and basic weather maps, was only sporadically communicated to the average citizen. While today we can track oncoming weather with radar, tune in to special weather television broadcasts, receive alerts on our mobile phones, and even send instant messages to those in the weather’s way, in 1935, most people were at the mercy of the elements.

May of 1935 was a wet month along the Front Range in Colorado. Over that Memorial Day, then commonly known as Decoration Day and celebrated on Thursday, May 30, the rainfall increased dramatically. What became Colorado Spring’s catastrophe, its own Memorial Day Flood, seems now to have been not only a tragedy there, but also a herald of an unfolding disaster on the Great Plains. Those heavy thunderstorm systems moved east across the high desert, down into Nebraska and Kansas. (You may read a brief intro to that Colorado Springs flood here.)

Kansas Department of Agriculture Republican flood basin map

The Republican River tributaries and river basin span parts of eastern Colorado, southern Nebraska and northern Kansas. The catastrophic storm that moved east on Decoration Day, 1935, dumped 24 inches of rain in one day and followed a nearly-perfect course for disaster, flooding those tributaries—the Arikaree, Frenchman, Blackwood, Beaver, Buffalo, Red Willow and Sappa Creeks, to name several. As the water gushed into the North and South Forks of the Republican, it created a wave of destruction that spanned three states and took weeks to ebb, defying prediction or belief. Given the forecasting and communication limitations of the day, and no flood control established along the river course, tragedy ensued.

For a back-in-the-day newspaper account of the concurrent flood and tornado events, you may find it interesting to read this special edition published by the Omaha World-Herald in June, 1935, scanned and offered online, courtesy of the NOAA. The photos are fascinating.

A glimpse of the Omaha World Herald souvenir Flood Edition, from weather.gov

It was eighty years ago, this week, that the skies ripped open and the Republican River broke free of its banks, as the Pawnee had tried to warn the early settlers it had previously done. In their oral history, they recalled that tame-looking water source to have risen so high, it spread from bluff to bluff. They camped on high ground and warned the first settlers away from the river bottom, but the water seemed so peaceful, and the soil so fertile there . . .

History, as it proves it will, repeated itself. In the last days of May and into June, 1935, the Republican raged, cresting twice in a few days. It took 113 human lives, killed tens of thousands of cattle and other livestock, destroyed homes, farms, businesses and crops, and coiled railroad iron like barbed wire. It washed out over 300 miles of roads and over 300 bridges, effectively isolating whole towns from the outside world for weeks, even months. The river in some places spread between one and two miles wide.

The Republican River Valley flood of 1935 precipitates a crisis in my novels-in-process. I’ve heavily researched the flood, delving into personal accounts, newspapers, local histories and weather analyses. I’ve driven and walked along much of the river’s course, from Kansas to Colorado, and it’s hard to believe, standing beside its gentle current, that it could have ever had such destructive power. It’s easy to see why the settlers were skeptical, and today it’s even easier to underestimate that river. There’s a reservoir in Harlan County, begun in 1946 and completed in the 1950s, that’s meant to tame the Republican. That dam is designed to hold back the water, to keep it in our grasp.

I have my doubts about that, doubts steeped in history and Native wisdom. The land under us, its rivers and the weather that swirls overhead, these are beyond our measurement, reckoning and control. We do our best to predict and direct our activities in line with the environment, but the earth holds us, not the other way around.

It’s something worth remembering, during this Memorial Day week, how small we are here on our planet, and how deep are the places we inhabit. To survive, we do well to walk humbly and embrace the history, stories, wisdom and community that preceded, surround and root us.

Franklin County, Nebraska, is where I trace my early roots. My parents both grew up there, graduating from Franklin High School. I attended Franklin Elementary for part of two grades, first and fourth. My grandmother, Laura, operated Laura’s Cafe on the highway for years, while Grandpa Henry farmed and worked as a janitor at the county courthouse. My paternal grandparents lived there, too, until they died, so Franklin holds many great memories for me.

Playing on the farm, shopping on what was then a thriving main street with two grocery stores, a Ben Franklin five and dime, two drug stores, clothing stores, a drive-in burger joint and several cafes . . . Franklin gave me a great taste of small town life in Nebraska, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. It connected me to Nebraska history and geography in an intimate way. Playing in a creekside pasture will do that, I guess.

These childhood and family memories form the backdrop and my inspiration to research and write about Nebraska history, especially events that unfolded near the Republican River. Some of that local history infuses The Darkwater Liar’s Account, while more details move to the forefront in the novels I’m currently writing.

That little farm east of Franklin was the fulfillment of my grandfather’s life dream. There was another man who inquired to purchase a farm south of Franklin, back in March of 1882, decades before my grandfather settled there. He penned a letter under the name of Thomas Howard, but his real name was Jesse James, and he answered this ad, seeking “a good farm for stock & grain.”

Historians suspect Jesse, a hunted man, intended to leave his criminal life and settle down, but couldn’t quite afford it. After visiting the Nebraska farm, he made the fateful decision to round up a gang and rob the Platte City Bank to finance his retirement. One member of that last gang was Robert Ford, the man rumored to have shot Jesse in the back of the head while Jesse straightened a picture on the wall. Ford may have gotten his $10,000 reward, but Jesse never fulfilled his dream, and Franklin never had its notorious outlaw farmer.

Would Jesse have made a good farmer? Maybe not. He might have grown restless after a season or two, called out of the furrows and barn, back to his old ways, by wail of a train whistle or the clank of a bank vault door. We’ll never know, but I like to think he might have become a good neighbor.

(History buffs may read the entire text of Jesse’s letter to Franklin, Nebraska, in Outlaws of the Border: A Complete and Authentic History of the Lives of Frank and Jesse James, written by Jay Donald and published in 1883. Thanks to the NEGenWeb site and rootsweb.ancestry.com for this information about Jesse James in Franklin County, Nebraska.)

With permission, I drew this sketch of a sacred bundle on display at the Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site near Republic, Kansas. Because of the bundle’s ongoing sanctity to the Pawnee people, on-site photographs are prohibited. The bundle appears to be made of some sort of hide, and tied with ribbon-like bands. A long smoking pipe, fragments of arrows, a fork tipped with bone and small American flags adorn the outside. The pipe appears to be carved of stone, with a stem of wood. A Kansas Historical web site reports that this particular bundle was once x-rayed, and contains stuffed bird bundles, hawk bells, counting sticks and a leather strip decorated with glass beads.

Sacred bundles like this were integral to Pawnee medicine ceremonies. Only a woman could possess a bundle, which usually hung on the west wall of a home or above an altar, while only men could utilize it in ceremonies.

A sign near this bundle reports that it originated near Loup, Nebraska. A young Pawnee girl named Sadie carried it away on horseback from the famous battle at Massacre Canyon near Trenton, Nebraska, in 1873. On that day, a thousand Sioux surprised 350 Pawnee men, women and children on their summer buffalo hunt, and approximately seventy Pawnee were killed. This is recorded as the last major battle between two Indian tribes in U.S. history. Sadie’s father entrusted the bundle to her at the battle, binding it to her back. He died that day, without having an opportunity to explain its ritual use. Sadie kept it safe as her family’s spiritual legacy, and her daughter entrusted it to the Kansas State Historical Society.

As I consider this object, I think about the manual labor and arts of preparing the skins and the pipe. I consider the meaning, now obscure, assigned to the arrows, the fork and the pipe. Who decorated that leather strip with beads? What are its colors and designs? How did the men handle the counting sticks in their rituals? The bones in those bird bundles once bore feathers high above the earth, with bright eyes looking down on prairie grasses, earth lodges and the twisting Republican River.

Time and memory. Meaning and mystery. Tragedy and hope. So much human experience, rolled up in leather and tied with ribbons and flags. The hope of a family, a legacy caught up in a crisis. A sign of enduring faith for a struggling people, suspended behind glass for this writer to sketch and ponder. Among all of my questions, one endures.

If I had to send my child running for survival today, with only seconds to decide, what bundle of meaning would I thrust into those young hands, to inspire my future generations?

In The Darkwater Liar’s Account, my main character mentions that the Pawnee once ranged over her Nebraska farm, near the fictional town of Darkwater Creek. What appears to be a passing comment in that context is for me a significant allusion to the historic and current Pawnee presence along the Republican River.

In my novel-in-process, one main character is a Kitkehahki (Republican) band Pawnee runaway from a White-run Indian Boarding School in 1914. Instead of returning to the Pawnee reservation in Oklahoma, he sets out on a quest to the Republican River Valley. For Kuruk, whose name means Bear, that river and surrounding plains are the backdrop of his grandfather’s legends, a residual ancestral memory and a spiritual destination.

On the first of my two research road trips through the Republican River Valley this summer, I visited the Pawnee Indian Museum State Historic Site near Republic, Kansas. The day I arrived, an archaeological team was solemnly reclosing the ground, after completing excavation of an earth lodge site, one of many there. I had an opportunity to discuss 1800s Pawnee history and culture with Kansas State University archaeologist Donna Roper, who has dedicated her career to the preservation of Pawnee ethnohistory. She brought history alive for me, and I thank her.

The lodges on this Kansas stretch of the Republican date to around 1820, and the largest one has been covered with a roof to preserve it for educational purposes. Its most striking features were the holes in the hard clay floor, some of which once anchored roof-support timbers. Others were deeper, for off-season food storage. A fire pit centered the communal living space. Many other unexcavated lodges surround that one, and resemble large buffalo wallows, as shown in my photo, above.

As I write about Nebraska and the Republican River Valley, Pawnee history is a key element of that place. As real as the fragrance of the ground that rises with the snowmelt in spring, Native American history infuses Great Plains reality. It invites us to dig deeper, remember with reverence, and search for meaning.

Readers lost a great novelist, and Great Plains and Western writers like myself lost a mentor, on Sunday.

Colorado should be proud of, and surely grieves for, Kent Haruf, a resident of Salida, Colorado, who wrote about a fictional Colorado Eastern plains community in Plain Song, Eventide and Benediction. Just prior to his death, he finished the copy edits for his upcoming novel, scheduled for release next year.

His fiction resounds with thoughtful observations of ordinary people, the bonds and limitations of community life and a special appreciation for the sugar beet farming country of eastern Colorado. His characters run from infants to the aged, from unwed mothers to bachelor farmers. In portraying all, he shows the grace of compassion and an exquisite mercy. His language is simple and strong.

After first reading his novels this year, I’d hoped someday to meet this national treasure and warm human being. An acquaintance from the Women Writing the West Conference, Susan Tweit, wrote an engaging post about her relationship with Haruf, her neighbor. Her words make me even more sorry I’ll never have the chance to know him, but his work inspires me to write clear, heartfelt stories about the Great Plains and West, focusing as he did on broken, yet redeemable, hearts and relationships.

I encourage you to feed your hearts and minds on Kent Haruf’s fiction. You may soon share my gratitude that his words live on. May he rest in the peace he shared in writing with all of us.

Nine years ago this winter, newlyweds Dave and I stood in the middle of a relative’s field and decided to build a sort of nest here, a home on some land outside of town. Farmers in this area generally alternate between soybean and corn crops, and 2005 was a corn year on this particular Wurth property, so we stood in the softening brown rows of recently-harvested stubble and imagined a home. I still have an ear of corn that the combine missed that season. It’s propped in a corner of a downstairs windowsill, to remind me of what was here before me.

We weren’t the first builders on this site. A local historian, also a Wurth relative, told us that in the early Twentieth Century, a one-room country school stood on this very corner. Constructed on every southeast square-mile corner down this main road, Amherst Township country schools, like most, had to be accessible for walking children.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I’m thankful for many things. One of them is that education has always been one of the first priorities for settlers on the Great Plains and the West, a legacy of which I am a happy beneficiary. In most homesteading communities, once shelter was erected for people and animals and crops were planted, even far-flung neighbors gathered to discuss their children’s education. Even before it was compulsory, education was a dream American settlers claimed for their children.

So, learning happened here, long before we built our dreams. Down in this ground, there may be chips of slate, rusting nails or broken toys. Maybe crumbling bits of a schoolhouse foundation and broken glass. Around where I sit at my desk, children gathered when a school bell rang, for study and play, reciting lessons, expanding their thoughts and becoming citizens of the wider world. A coal stove belched smoke and glowed to keep out the winter chill. Chalk dust hovered in the air and a water bucket with a dipper probably stood in the corner. Books fell on the floor. Inkwells spilled. Feet scraped on hardwood floors. I wonder where the outhouse stood? There’s a thought. No wonder this soil is so fertile, and my flowers so bright every summer!

Considering the old school that stood on these corner acres, I’m even more grateful to live in this place. Thank you, children, for being an invisible but real part of my history. Thank you, teachers, for all you gave. You still provide joy, as I remember.

For those of us who take comfortable, well-equipped schools, computers and information for granted in this digital age, let’s put our energies into teaching our children what’s most important. Let’s teach them to be grateful for the people who were first in their places, and the richness of history that surrounds them.

Let’s teach them how to think and how to learn, before they leave our nest.

Page Lambert said at the Women Writing the West conference in October, “For each of us, and with each new story, Place will be different. At its heart will be everything that has ever been born, lived in, or died in that place, everything in the past, everything in the present, all energy— every sound, smell, ray of sun, every shadow, every sorrow, every joy.”

I considered these words deeply during my return to Colorado, where I grew up. As I sat on a boulder beside the St. Vrain River, I listened to the river rushing and delighted in the golden aspen leaves overhead. I considered the many times I’d been there as a child, with various friends and family, some now deceased. I thought, too, about the flood rearranged much of the valley’s beauty in September of 2013, and how that place must have seemed very different during those disastrous days. I could see the marks of that flood in the road repair signs, as well as the sand deposits and detritus lining the river

Personal, geographic and climate events are just a few dimensions of the place where you find yourself, right now.

Picture the changes that cycle through your current location. Remember or imagine, too, the people who lived, loved and died there. Recall the conquerors and the conquered who fought over and for the territory you occupy, who longed for the place you call home.

Imagine their sounds and shadows, their sorrows and joys. Imagine the richness of your place.